‘I think you need to understand the law, Mr Towers, before you go any further. Firstly, you need to be sure that a girl is over the age of consent. We don’t know how old Elena is, but we do know that some girls are being brought to this country for prostitution well under the age of sixteen. Secondly, you have to be sure that consent is given on each and every occasion you sleep with a woman. In the case of Grace and Elena we have reason to believe that they have been brought into the country illegally and have been forced into prostitution by violence and threats. In that case consent is always and every time in doubt. I’m told that Elena at least speaks very little English so it’s difficult to know how you can be so sure she was willing. Do you understand what I’m saying?’
Towers swallowed hard and nodded, giving his solicitor a desperate glance, but he too was looking pale and seemed unable to find his voice.
‘Do you understand?’ Thackeray repeated.
‘Yeah, yeah,’ Towers said. ‘We didn’t know they were on the game. We thought they were out for a good time. There were often a few girls like that there.’
‘So how exactly did they get to these parties?’ Thackeray snapped. ‘Did you or the other players ask for girls to be provided?’
‘No, of course not,’ Towers said. ‘My fiancée would kill me if I tried anything like that. They just turned up.’
‘But who arranged for them to turn up? We have evidence that they were brought by car and that there were men, minders, with them. Someone must have invited them to come. Was it Paolo Minelli? Was it a little perk he provided when you’d had a good result? Did he pay them if you didn’t?’
Towers’ eyes widened in horror.
‘Hell, no,’ he said.
‘So if not him, who? Who was paying for the whores to make themselves available, Mr Towers? Who was the pimp?’
‘I don’t know,’ Towers said. ‘I swear to God I don’t know.’
‘Do you know a man called Stephen Stone?’ Thackeray asked, but Towers shook his head.
‘I don’t think so,’ he said.
‘He was at the last party you had at the West Royd club after the Chelsea game,’ Thackeray said. ‘I was there myself and I saw him. He’s the brother of Angelica Stone, Minelli’s girlfriend.’
Towers nodded as if to indicate his pressing desire to be helpful now the focus had shifted slightly from his own behaviour.
‘I know Angelica,’ he said. ‘She’s often around. But her brother? No.’
‘And girls were there that night, as well? Girls you knew would be willing and eager to go upstairs with you?’
‘Most of us had our wives or girlfriends with us that night. You know how it is? The previous party was a bit impromptu. Just the lads. But at the Chelsea party I couldn’t do owt. Dave were in the same boat. But I think OK got his end away wi’one of them, though not the black lass he really fancied. I didn’t see her or her friend that night. OK was really taken with the lass he met after the Rochdale game. I’m pretty sure he saw her again. But I didn’t see her, certainly not at the Chelsea party. But you need to ask him not me.’
‘So you two couldn’t find an opportunity to cheat on your wife and girlfriend that night, then?’ Thackeray’s voice was loaded with contempt.
‘I think that remark is a bit unnecessary, Chief Inspector,’ Towers’ solicitor said faintly.
‘Do you?’ Thackeray said. ‘How would you describe it then?’ But he didn’t wait for an answer. ‘I’m seeing your teammate Dave Peters later,’ he said to Towers. ‘I shall expect your stories to tally. In the meantime you can go, but I fully expect to need to talk to you again.’
‘There’s one thing,’ Towers said suddenly, his voice half strangled. ‘OK Okigbo said you told him his tart had Aids.’ His solicitor drew a sharp breath again, evidently still capable of being shocked by what he was hearing.
‘I didn’t say that,’ Thackeray snapped. ‘I told him the murdered girl, Grace, was HIV positive. We don’t know about the other girl because we haven’t made contact with her yet.’
Towers said nothing but he seemed to have difficulty getting to his feet, and when he did he looked faintly green beneath his expensive tan. His solicitor followed him to the interview room door looking almost as distressed.
‘You know where to contact me, Chief Inspector,’ he said.
‘Oh yes,’ Thackeray said and, to DC Hodge’s surprise, when the door had closed behind the footballer and his lawyer, he thumped his fist down so hard on the interview room table that they both winced.
‘Boss?’ the younger man said cautiously. Thackeray looked up and shook his head briefly, his eyes opaque.
‘Better than thumping that over-paid, incontinent young bastard, which is what he deserves,’ he said. ‘Come on, let’s see if the next one has arrived. If the CPS would wear it, I’d like to charge the lot of them with statutory rape, but I don’t suppose they will. We’ll just go on persecuting the women. There’s not much obvious correlation between the law and justice, is there?’ And he led his bemused young colleague out of the room.
Laura arrived at the Gazette office that morning late, tired and thoroughly deflated. She had slept badly, alone in the bed she normally shared with Michael Thackeray, and had then been roused from her semi-stupor as she sat in the kitchen, hunched over a large mug of coffee, by a call from police headquarters asking her to see Superintendent Longley as soon as she could that morning. Feeling slightly sick, she had made an appointment and presented herself in Longley’s office, where she found the Superintendent alone, in full uniform, gazing out of his window at the wind-swept town hall square below. Eventually he turned and held out a hand for her to shake with an expression that was about as far from welcoming as she could imagine.
Laura felt she knew Longley well enough, having lived with Thackeray’s take on his boss for so long, but she had met him only a couple of times, and never in circumstances remotely like this. She took in his portly shape encased in navy blue with buttons gleaming, his shiny, almost bald head, and the fleshy, slightly grey, creased face and chilly blue eyes, and recognised an unhappy and seriously embarrassed man.
‘Ms Ackroyd, sit down,’ Longley said, waving her into a chair and lowering himself into his own with ponderous dignity.
‘Laura, please,’ she said, flicking the cloud of copper-coloured hair she had not had time to put up out of her eyes, and crossing her legs, encased in her red leather boots. Confession, she thought, might be the best, possibly the only, form of defence, although she doubted she would be offered much in the way of absolution, either here or anywhere else this morning. While Longley hesitated, she waded in.
‘You don’t have to tell me that I’ve been involved in something very stupid, and I don’t have to tell you how sorry I am,’ she said. ‘I don’t regret having helped this girl Elena when she was obviously sick and in trouble, but once I realised the police wanted to interview her in connection with the death of the other girl, I know I should have brought her straight here, not given her the chance to run off again.’
Looking rather less than disarmed, Longley leant across his desk.
‘Concealing an illegal immigrant is an offence, Ms Ackroyd,’ he said.
‘She was half-starved, sick and unable to communicate very much,’ Laura said. ‘I regarded her as a victim not a criminal, and I wanted to get hold of a translator and find out a bit more before I persuaded her to talk to the authorities. Not such a big deal.’
‘With a story for your newspaper in mind, no doubt?’
Laura flushed slightly.
‘That wasn’t my top priority,’ she said. ‘But it was a consideration, yes. I was shocked by what Elena told me. It’s something that’s largely hidden. I thought Gazette readers should know that the trafficking of young girls was going on right here in Bradfield. And I knew that if she was arrested there was a strong chance that she’d be shipped off to some immigration detention centre and I’d not be able to speak to her easily again. Was
I wrong? Were you even aware of this horrible trade on your doorstep?’
But Longley refused to bat that one back.
‘We have a special unit dealing with this sort of thing at County,’ he said. ‘But that’s hardly the point. This was a murder investigation that your own…’ He hesitated, old and conservative enough for the word he was looking for not to come easily to his lips. ‘That your own partner was investigating. I’m amazed you didn’t tell Michael about the girl your grandmother had taken in.’
Laura glanced away. There was no way she was going to confide in Longley about the state of her relationship with Michael Thackeray.
‘My grandmother and I decided we should find out a bit more about Elena’s circumstances. What she was saying was very vague and garbled. We needed her to get her strength back and I needed to find a translator. Speakers of Albanian are a bit difficult to track down. It took time. Once I’d learnt the full story I knew we would have to talk to the authorities – the immigration people, the police, whoever. But I thought it was kinder to let her have a bit of peace with the Ibramovic’s. They’re good people. They were keen to look after her, and I knew she’d be safe there, well out of Bradfield. I didn’t know you were looking for her then.’
Laura pushed her unruly hair away from her face and leant towards Longley, putting all her considerable powers of persuasion into her voice.
‘It was pure bad luck that I wasn’t at work when you issued the picture and the appeal for Elena,’ she said. ‘If I’d known on Wednesday, of course I would have told Michael then. You have to believe that.’ But Laura knew that it was not Longley that she had to convince, it was Michael Thackeray himself, and however sceptically the Superintendent might look at her, Thackeray would take even more persuading.
‘So you went back to Ilkley on Thursday when you realised we were looking for the girl, but you still didn’t bring her back to Bradfield,’ Longley said, real anger in his voice now. ‘You left her there and gave her and the Ibramovic girl the chance to run off. You’ll forgive me if I suggest that was criminally careless of you.’
‘Yes,’ Laura said. ‘That was stupid. I was hoping Michael would go out to Ilkley to talk to her rather than her having to be taken to the police station. You’ve no idea how fragile she is. It never crossed my mind that she would run away.’
‘A lot of things seem to have never crossed your mind, Ms Ackroyd, not least the fact that if this girl has been used in the way she claims, the people who have abused her, who may well be the same people who have murdered her friend, will be extremely anxious to get her back. Being arrested as an illegal immigrant may be unpleasant, but believe me, having her fall back into the hands of the people traffickers could be much, much worse.’
Laura nodded, feeling sick and numb, knowing she could not argue with that, and Longley leant back in his chair and sighed.
‘I’ll arrange for one of my officers to take a formal statement from you,’ he said. ‘I’ve already asked a detective and a woman officer to visit your grandmother to do the same. I understand she’s not very mobile.’
‘Thank you,’ Laura said.
‘I think I should warn you that I may have to pass what you’ve told me to the Crown Prosecution Service. You seem to have interfered pretty disastrously in a murder investigation, and not for the first time. They may decide to pursue it further.’
‘Whatever,’ Laura said dully, thinking how furious her friend Vicky Mendelson’s husband David, who worked for the CPS, would be when he found out what had happened. She wondered where she could find a friend and ally in all this mess.
Longley hesitated for a moment.
‘When are you due to talk to the inquiry at County HQ?’ he asked.
‘Next week,’ Laura said, and the Superintendent nodded.
‘I think,’ he said carefully, ‘that you and the DCI need to discuss just how your private and your professional lives intersect, don’t you? This is the second time it’s been a major problem.’
‘I’m sure we do,’ Laura said non-committally, biting her lip to prevent herself blurting out that her main fear this morning was not statements or inquiries or even the possibility of prosecution but the fact that she and Michael Thackeray would not intersect again in any significant way at all.
Half an hour later she had left the police station, having signed her statement. She had felt even more drained than she had when she got out of bed that morning as she had walked slowly across the town to the Gazette office where she was met, before she took off her coat, by an evidently over-excited Tony Holloway.
‘Where’ve you been? I need to talk to you,’ he said, following on her heels to her desk. ‘All hell’s broken loose at United and Ted Grant’s doing his nut.’
‘What’s happened now?’ Laura asked wearily. ‘You may think I’m muscling in on your territory, Tony, but I can tell you honestly, nothing’s further from my mind.’
‘Never mind all that now,’ Tony said. ‘You can help, actually. I can’t get much sense out of the press people at Beck Lane, and I know you’ve managed to inveigle your way into Jenna Heywood’s good books, so Ted wants you to call her and see if we can firm up the rumours that are flying around.’
‘What rumours are they?’ Laura asked.
‘Just that OK Okigbo, and possibly some of the other players, have been sleeping with tarts and have picked up something nasty from them, probably AIDS. And that they’ve been interviewed by the police because one of the girls is the one who ended up dead in the canal. I dare say lover-boy may just have mentioned that in passing, but we know where your loyalties lie, don’t we? So – we could have our star player banged up as a murder suspect just before they’re due to go to London for the Chelsea replay. How major is that?’
Laura felt very cold suddenly. She shook her head.
‘I know absolutely nothing about all that,’ she said. ‘And I doubt very much that Jenna Heywood will tell me anything, even if it’s true. It’s the sort of thing they’ll put a very tight lid on. You know that.’
‘It could finish the club off if it’s true,’ Tony said. ‘The shareholders’ll do their nut. Will you call her?’
‘Is that what Ted wants?’ Laura asked, glancing towards the editor’s glass-walled office where, unusually, the door was tight shut.
‘That’s what Ted wants,’ Tony said.
Laura sat down at her desk and picked up the phone to call the football club and, to her surprise, was put straight through to Jenna. But when she spelt out the reason for her call Jenna interrupted her coldly.
‘We’ve got no comment on that,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry, Laura. You’ll have to ask the press office at police HQ what’s going on.’
‘I think we’ve already tried that,’ Laura said, glancing at Tony, but thinking of Elena. A place like a hotel, she had said, but why not the country club? ‘You realise that the girl who was murdered and her friend could have been at your team parties, don’t you? And that they were probably prostitutes in the country illegally.’
‘No comment,’ Jenna said.
‘Have you seen the photograph of the girls?’ Laura persisted. ‘You might even recognise them.’
Jenna seemed to hesitate for no more than a split second, and seemed to be weighing her words very carefully.
‘If I do, I’ll be talking to the coach about it and telling the police, not you. Now I must get on.’
Laura hesitated, absolutely sure that Jenna knew more than she was telling her.
‘You recognised her, didn’t you?’ she said. ‘Do you also know who arranged for the girls to be at those parties? Was it Minelli?’
‘No comment,’ Jenna said sharply. ‘I’ve nothing to say to the Gazette about the players’ private lives.’
‘There’s one other thing, Jenna,’ Laura said impulsively. ‘You might like to know that my father’s apparently sold his shares in United to Les Hardcastle.’ She heard Jenna draw a sharp breath at the other end of the phone.
Laura put the phone down and shook her head at Tony Holloway.
‘Nothing doing,’ she said. ‘Whatever she knows she’s not telling me. By the sound of it she’s still more worried about the in-fighting amongst the directors than she is about any problem with the players. I think maybe your rumours are just that – rumours.’
‘No way,’ Holloway said, looking obstinate.
‘Wouldn’t it be more productive to do some digging around Les Hardcastle’s plans for the club?’ she suggested. ‘If anything’s a threat to its future it’s that, not the sexual antics of the players.’
‘Give me a break, Laura,’ he snapped. ‘If only half what I’m hearing about OK Okigbo is true the whole Press pack from London will already be halfway up the M1. I need to break this story and I need to break it before they arrive. It’s mega.’
‘If you say so, Tony,’ Laura said wearily as she logged onto her computer. ‘If you say so.’
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Sergeant Kevin Mower put his head round DCI Thackeray’s door later that morning and found his boss more or less as he had left him several hours before, his room fuggy with cigarette smoke and a pile of unopened files on the desk in front of him. He glanced up lethargically as Mower came in and closed the door.
‘Developments, guv,’ the Sergeant said. ‘I’ve had a long talk with Ibramovic and pretty well wrung him dry. He’s not unhelpful. He knows we’re doing our best. But he was more useful on what the girl told him about the trafficking racket than he is on where she and his daughter may have gone. He doesn’t seem to have any idea about that.’
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